Lure of hearth and home

After so many years writing about Australia, Paul Kelly still has plenty to offer. By Meredith Wilkie.

He is still slim and petite, still dresses in black, though his hair is more salt than pepper these days. That familiar, rather nasal voice is subdued, almost soft, in conversation, and he exudes a calmness, a sense of control, as though he knows just what's coming. And he probably does. Paul Kelly's career stretches back into almost ancient Australian music history, and there probably isn't an interview question he hasn't answered a hundred times already.

He has been writing, performing and recording prolifically for two and a half decades: silver, as anniversaries go, he notes wryly. He is doing media duty today, promoting his new double-album Ways and Means. After 25 years, the 49-year-old's output seems to be increasing lately, rather than slowing down. His name seems to have been popping up attached to just about everything in the past few years: films and films scores, music for television, collaborations, books, production and theatre. He has a new record, a new record company and a new relationship, with Age columnist Sian Prior.

"It's clear that Paul has started a new chapter (call it the 50s if you like)," says his friend singer/songwriter Deborah Conway, "He's healthy and happy with a lot of new starts going on.

"You know, ageing sucks pretty much: hangovers are worse, injuries harder to recover from, short-term memory not as reliable, but one can be graceful. This is where Paul's being blase about the music biz really pays off. There's not much room for older pop stars in this country but Paul has entirely skirted the issue, has diversified into numbers of areas that don't care about his being of any particular age, has avoided the judgements by never fully taking them on board in the first place."

There's no denying that Kelly has pretty much achieved iconic status in Australia, that he has managed to remain almost as popular as he is prolific, something most of his contemporaries have not. But when your audience has grown up with you, has settled down with kids and mortgages, remembers all your old stuff, and worries about the way the world's changed, is there anything left to say?

Maybe it's to enjoy life, to take pleasure in the little things, since Kelly's new album is an attempt to write "happy love songs", and it is indeed bigger, lustier and more upbeat than quintessentially melancholy Paul Kelly fare such as Deeper Water (1995) or 2001's Nothing But a Dream. "It's been an ambition of mine to write positive love songs," he says. "They're hard ones to write - it's much easier to write about conflict and love gone wrong, so I've been trying for a long time to write love gone right songs."

Yet Kelly's prolific output in the past few years seems to be despite huge personal upheaval: the loss of his mother in 2000 and the break-up of his long-time relationship with actor Kaarin Fairfax soon after. "I think everything affects your art," he says, "but it can actually be much more looped around. I think often people try to make connections between life and art, and you know your life feeds your art all the time, but not in very obvious ways." Kelly and Fairfax met in 1988, and the first of their two daughters, Madeleine (now 12), was born in 1991. Memphis came along two years later. At the time Kelly and Fairfax seemed to effortlessly combine their careers and their children. It was Memphis who starred alongside her parents in Rachel Perkins's 2001 short film One Night the Moon, to which Kelly also contributed musically. Not long after its release, Kelly and Fairfax separated. He said at the time that though they had parted, everything seemed to be working out: "We're still friends and still parents together," he said.

Born in 1955, Paul Kelly grew up in Adelaide, the sixth of nine children, in a big noisy house in the suburb of Kensington. The parents lavished praise on their children. The kids learned piano, played sport, laughed, fought, and music of all kinds seeped from record players and bedrooms. He was the grandchild of Italian opera singers, who established the first Italian grand opera company in Australia. Count Ercole Filippini was a leading baritone under contract to La Scala Grand Opera Company in Milan. Contessa Anne Filippini was the first woman to conduct symphony orchestras in Australia. Their daughter, Kelly's mother Josephine, was also a singer, though expended most of her energy raising her family.

Kelly was a happy, though peculiar child. A middle child in a big family, whose ambitions were always high. "For a while I wanted to be a trumpet-player," he says; "I played a lot of sports so I wanted to play football for Melbourne and I wanted to play Test cricket, and then wanting to be a writer, a writer like Jack Kerouac."

The first songs he heard as a child were My Boomerang Won't Come Back by Rolf Harris, and Johnny Horton's The Battle of New Orleans. "Battle of New Orleans had this really vivid imagery," he recalls, "I had no idea what the song was about, it was just this great picture in my mind. Sink the Bismarck, I think I remember that one as well. They were pretty vivid songs - none of them were love songs, I've just realised.

"I can remember different periods of being affected by different members of my family," he recollects; "my sister Sheila had a boyfriend who was a trumpet player for a while and I was starting to learn trumpet so he brought me round Louis Armstrong records, Kenny Ball, and then when I was a bit older, the brothers just above me started playing Bob Dylan records, and then later on when my eldest brother went to university he started playing strange records like early Pink Floyd and Moody Blues.

"I have very vivid memories of lying in the dark listening to music and I would just shut my eyes and lie in the dark and just go away somewhere."

When Kelly was just 13, his father John died at the age of 52 of Parkinson's disease.

"I have good memories," Kelly once remarked. "He was the kind of father that, well, I missed him when he died very much. The older children were growing into him at the time he died. He was not well enough to play sport with me."

Kelly himself was 25 when he married his first wife, Hilary Brown. Their son Declan is now 23, works in a record store and DJs around Melbourne. But before he was 30, Kelly made the infamous trip from "St Kilda to Kings Cross", leaving behind a broken marriage, his band, record company and an ill-deserved reputation as a junkie.

While it might have been one of his lowest points privately, creatively he was on the edge of his breakthrough albums Post and Gossip. Post was Rolling Stone's album of the year in 1985, and remains an enviable achievement: a critical and commercial success for a serious songwriter singing about Australia.

Kelly had taken to the road after finishing school in Adelaide, travelling around remote parts of the country, before returning to study arts at Flinders University in 1973. He left after a year.

He ended up in Melbourne, and found a creative niche with his third band, the Coloured Girls - who later became the Messengers. And it was with them in 1986 that Kelly finally started to make a living from music; the single Before Too Long from Gossip enjoying abundant radio play. "It was the best feeling," he says. "It's something I'm always mindful of - I still feel very grateful that I can make a living from play - because songwriting's playing - and it still gives me a thrill that it happens."

As a songwriter who has always been lyric-based, rather than image-based, there's no question that young Australian songwriters look to Kelly as an elder statesman. But where his songs had a sense of desperation, of politics and life on the edge, in the mid-1980s to early 1990s, his latest album seems much more comfortable, less melancholy, more settled: a little like his life.

These days, when at home in St Kilda, he is happy "just being at home with the ones I love," he says, "cooking in my own kitchen with my own parsley, basil and chilli from the backyard. Also playing touch football twice a week with a group of friends when I'm in town. Bodysurfing, swimming at Prahran Pool and going to the movies."

Paul Kelly plays the Concert Hall on Tuesday and the Peninsula Hotel on Wednesday.